http://www.cs.brown.edu/~rbb/ctcr/

Next fall, the MIT Faculty will launch its MIT OpenCourseWare initiative -- a program that will make the basic educational materials for 2,000 of our subjects available on the Web -- available to anyone anywhere free of charge.
  Why would we do this? Because we see it as part of our mission: to help to raise the quality of higher education in every corner of the globe.
  This program is based on the twin values of opportunity and openness. These are values that have made our universities and our nation strong. They are values that will keep our world safe and strong. And they are values that you should treasure and protect as you make your way in the world.
from "Opportunity and Openness", President Charles M. Vest's Charge to the Graduates presented at the 136th Commencement Ceremonies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Friday, June 7, 2002.

Today's session of the CTCR Seminar features Anne Margulies, the Executive Director of the MIT OpenCourseWare Project (http://ocw.mit.edu/). She will discuss the experiences they've had in publishing 500 MIT courses (so far) and the impact that the OCW Initiative has had on teaching at MIT and elsewhere.

The openness referred to by Charles Vest is obvious, but the opportunities for teaching, learning and curricular reform are perhaps more striking. A quick look at several of the courses currently available (e.g. 5.12: Organic Chemistry, 24.119 Mind and Machines, and 6.805J / 6.806 / STS.085 Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier), suggests possibilities not only for independent study, but for hybrid course design, and the sort of "scholarship of teaching" that guests of the Sheridan Center have been talking about and promoting for years.

Anne Margulies

Anne H. Margulies is the executive director of MIT's bold OpenCourseWare initiative, and brings 20 years of leadership experience in strategic planning, information technology and operations to the MIT OCW project. She came to MIT in May 2002 from FH/GPC, a government relations, public affairs and communications consulting firm where she was the Chief Operations Officer responsible for the overall performance of the firm. Prior to her time at FH/GPC, Anne was the executive vice-president of McDermott O'Neill & Associates, where she restructured the senior management team and planned and managed the sale of the company to GPC International.

From 1986 to 1998, Anne held information technology positions at Harvard University, serving as assistant provost and executive director for Harvard's Information Systems department with responsibility for all centralized administrative IT activities

Readings for November 20th:

• "Disturbing the Educational Universe: Universities in the Digital Age -- Dinosaurs or Prometheans?" by Charles M. Vest. Report of the President For the Academic Year 2000-01.
• "Open courseware and open source software, by Stefan Baldi, Hauke Heier, and Anett Mehler-Bicher. Communications of the ACM, Vol 46, Issue 9 (September 2003).
• "Remaking Liberal Education", by Kelly T. Mills. Academe, Jan/Feb 2003, Vol. 89, Issue #1, p. 28.
• "MIT's Open Window", by Florence Olsen. Chronicle of Higher Education,12/6/2002, Vol. 49, Issue 15, p.A31.

  Note: If you wish to access the full-text articles from off-campus, you should return to this page after authenticating as a Brown user, through Brown's proxy server.

Information about the Seminar, including schedules, session descriptions, archived materials, and links to background readings will be available at this site throughout the year. Notes from the first CTCR session can be found at: http://www.cs.brown.edu/~rbb/ctcr/ctcr.oct23.html.

This page was last updated: November 20, 2003.

© 2003 Roger B. Blumberg and Brown University